I am doing some floor restructuring in this update; I want to move toward all floors offering a single, unique type of minion or trap. There are only a few floors that break this rule, but changing them will also affect other floor requirements. So here's what's changed so far:

• Alchemist now requires Cellar + Study and produces Mad Scientist
  
• Laboratory now requires Alchemist + Catacombs and only produces Flesh Golem
  
• Overlook now requires Lode + (Portal OR Dwelling); this will also change later, though (because it currently produces two different units depending upon other floors)
  
• Vibrant Vein is no longer parallel or mutually exclusive to the Lode; it now requires Lode + Study and produces Stone Golems
  

If you had the Lode unlocked before, you will automatically have the now separate Vein prophecy unlocked. Many players have stated in the past that they hated having to choose between the Vein and the Lode, but mostly because the two were so similar and it was easy to choose the "wrong" one for their resource needs; I believe this change should help rectify this while also fulfilling my goal of giving every floor a unique minion (rather than both producing the Goblin Miner).

As some of you may know from the community forums, streams, or direct conversations with me, I am preparing for another big opt-in beta period to try out some major changes and additions. Before I dive into that, I want to make sure that the current standard release is in a good place. To that end, I am re-organizing some of the floor/prophecy tree for consistency, making some UI and usability improvements, and working on general stability. While I continue with these things, I am also trying out some mechanical changes that are less volatile or inter-dependent than the big stuff I have planned.

This update contains two such changes: traps can now trigger during combat and support abilities no longer take up a combat slot.

The trap change means that traps can now harm minions (although minions will not trigger the traps), and allows you to have battles on trapped floors without losing the effects of the trap. The best use of this would be to place minions who are immune to that trap (either due to damage resistances or due to defense type) on that floor. The only downside is that you may have to babysit these floors a little more than a typical floor, because new minions will not come in to supplement those who perish there.

The support change is even more significant: all support abilities are now in the "special" ability spot, and will always apply when a character is in combat, regardless of slot. Before, players had to make a trade-off between an extra attack or having a support role in their line-up, and I think the advantage of the support role wasn't always obvious compared to having an additional attack, somewhat discouraging this synergy. This is a non-trivial change, and I will need to gather more feedback on this, but I definitely think it will motivate players to build more effective bands of minions.

Because it has been over a month since the last release and there are some significant underlying changes, I am especially concerned with stability in this update; please let me know (here, in the forums, via personal message, etc.) if you experience any issues at all!

I know it's been a very slow summer for me and the game, but I am continuing to listen and work on improving it. I hope you'll all keep sharing your thoughts and suggestions on how things are going and where you'd like them to head. Thanks again for all of your support! :totcordial:

Changelog

Additions:

• Stone Golem (tough, worker construct with explosion weakness)
  
• Separate Vein prophecy (this floor was previously tied to unlocking the Lode)
  
• Traps now track and report kills
  

Changes:

• Removed support slot, moving these abilities into an always-on special slot
  
• Traps can now trigger during battles
  
• Traps can now harm minions
  
• Floors provide more trap information in their tooltips (damage, cooldown, and kills)
  
• Vibrant Vein now 4 tiles tall, requires Lode + Study
  
• Alchemist now produces Mad Scientist, requires Study + Cellar
  
• Laboratory now only produces Flesh Golem, requires Alchemist + Catacombs
  
• Overlook now requires Lode + (Portal OR Dwelling)
  
• Reduced leveling-oriented prophecy goals
  
• Trap codex damage now uses verbose tooltips--like character abilities
  
• Abilities that boost recovery rates now have their own verbose tooltip, rather than using the default format
  
• Merged characters now retain the old character's slot assignment (or absorb that of the mergee, if the original was unassigned)
  
• Clicking on the "Heroes are nearing your Sanctum" message will jump to the floor where this is occurring
  
• Minor changes and edits for epilogue and codex text
  
• Melee attackers are now always rendered in front of defenders (because this looks better)
  

Fixes:

• On some systems, controller polling would cause a momentary stutter every 20-30 seconds
  
• Crash involving specific actions during the tutorial
  
• Crash associated with merging and replacing a character assigned to a slot
  
• Epilogue kill count was including those killed by the destruction of the previous dungeon
  
• Inconsistency with support abilities that reduced melee or ranged damage (by slot and not by damage type)
  
• Abilities that buffed recovery rates were not always being used
  
• Glitch with some melee animations that caused them to end and jump back very abruptly
  
• A couple of trap icons were being misplaced in the Codex